Free The Judas Cloth by Julia O'Faolain Page B

keep nothing personal. Everything belonged to the community and even the property her uncle left had become her spiritual dowry without which she would have had to become a lay sister and do menial work. Hearing that her uncle’s housekeeper was without provision, she had asked whether it would not be right to give her the money and for her, Sister Paola, to become a lay sister.
    ‘No,’ said Monsignor Mastai, adding that excessive humility was a form of pride.
    ‘Detach yourself from creatures.’ But could one not serve God in creatures? ‘I,’ she told the abbess, ‘did a little nursing in my uncle’s parish. Should we not concern ourselves with people’s bodies so as to help their souls?
    The abbess said we must raise the matter with our new bishop. ‘How are you getting on,’ she asked, ‘with the new confessor?’
    ‘I think I frightened him.’
    The priest had been baffled by Sister Paola. Had she not been His Holiness’s penitent, he would, he told the abbess, have thought her unstable.
    ‘Would you say the saints were all stable?’
    ‘But they were saints!’
    ‘Do you think those around them could tell?’
    The abbess looked at the chubby face in front of her. Twenty-five years old? Twenty-six? ‘Father,’ she gave him the title without satiric intent. However, he blushed. ‘You should know that Sister Paola’s instability is due not to herself but to history. Shocking things happened in ’31. His Holiness used to discourage her dwelling on them. You may have your own ideas …’
    Again the priest reddened and within days word came from the bishop that a new confessor would be sent. The first one wasn’t, it seemed, up to being a secular priest at all and was now thinking of becoming a monk. The bishop expressed regret.
    ‘What,’ the abbess asked Sister Paola with curiosity, ‘upset him?’
    ‘He asked me to confess a sin from my past life. I told him about the child.’
    ‘Ah.’ The abbess had been led to suppose that Sister Paola was suffering from a lapse of memory with regard to the child and that this was a mercy.
    ‘I have the evidence of my senses to remind me,’ said the nun. ‘Marks on my stomach.’
    ‘Do you worry about the baby?’
    ‘No. I was promised that it was being looked after and would be better off without me. I should like to help people who have nobody to look after them.’
    Sister Paola was now thirty-one years old and knew her own mind.
    Shortly after this the abbess arranged for her to study nursing with a French nun who claimed a connection with the Bonapartes and talked of them eagerly, especially of Louis Napoleon, who had so much of the family ambition that he had wrecked a plan to marry his cousin by embarking on a coup d’état which failed. Princess Mathilde – the cousin – had had to learn from the public press that her betrothal was off and her intended leaving for an enforced exile in the United States.
    ‘What a shock,’ said the nun, ‘for a young girl. He’s back, you know. Now. In Paris. He may yet come to power.’
    ‘Show me how to make a plaster.’
    ‘You haven’t an ounce of romance!’
    Sister Paola did not mention her own meeting with Louis Napoleon but found her mind returning to that time and to her uncle’s death.
    Coming in from the glitter of noon, she had sensed rather than seen him in the gloom of his curtained, walnut bed.
    The housekeeper had warned: ‘He’s raving. The Bonaparte riffraff did for him.’
    ‘No,’ whispered the dying man and the whites of his eyes were phosphorescent. ‘It was her! She fornicated with them!’
    The woman pulled at the girl’s arm and both saw a gleam of malice in the dying eyes.
    ‘He’s dead.’
    ‘No!’
    But he was. The malice was the fixity of death.
    Again she brought up the idea of giving money to the housekeeper. But the abbess said, ‘My dear, leave the poor wretch alone. Don’t go piling coals of fire on her head and shaming her. She has probably made some sort